In the 21st century it seems the art of writing if not dead completely will soon be resigned to pages of history. Some even foresee the book will follow suit in the coming decades with the continuing and unrelenting rise of digitzation.

Certainly the digital natives; tech savvy children amongst us will have little knowledge of this long period in our history and in an age of mobile instantaneous, few will look to indulge beyond the most enquiring graphic designers, artists or those who received a calligraphy set as a Christmas or birthday present.

Even digital immigrants have increasingly forsaken this once most personal form of communication.

Whilst looking at the picture of the ornate and beautifully and skillfully crafted writing box or “Victorian laptop” (Catherine Golden 2010) dating to around the 1850s, made from Indian Calamander wood or Coromandel wood and decorated with ornate brass mounts, one can with a little imagination see the similarities with its modern 21st century counterpart, the iPad; communication and portability; high end craftsmanship and quality; beauty and design; functionality and practicality; attention to detail and mass production.

For most Mancunians, Piccadilly Gardens has traditionally been the centre of Manchester. This is due to Piccadilly Gardens being at the centre of public transport and also as it is a rare and much treasured green oasis in and amongst all the stone and brick and in 2012 concrete that enwraps it.

Unlike London which developed many large and impressive inner city parks, the relentless march of industry in Manchester throughout the 18th and 19th century saw most of Manchester’s inner city green space decimated and torn up to be replaced with factories, mills and warehouses. Buildings of round-the-clock toil and sweat, commerce and business and billowing chimneys; the pillars of industry that once proliferated the landscape and drove and transformed Manchester into world renowned metropolis of cotton – Cottonopolis has it was known worldwide.

Within this transformation, where once green space and open fields were plentiful, land was now carved up and sold off to industrialists and men of ambition. This was the birth of the modern city and the defining separation from the countryside where our ancestors had worked and lived their lives for centuries.Further reading

The Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act came came into power in 1965 ending 305 years of capital punishment in the United Kingdom. For over 3 centuries state sponsored death had been used to uphold the laws of the time and protect the interests of those in power and the society it governed.

On 13th August 1964 at precisely 8.00 a.m. The traps of hanging gallows 50 kilometres apart opened simultaneously for the very last time, dropping and ending the lives of the last two men to be hung in England under the Homicide Act 1957

Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans in 1964.

At Manchester’s notorious Victorian Strangeways Prison, 24 year old Gwynne Owen Evans was hanged for the capital murder of John West whilst at the exact same time 21 year old Peter Allen was hanged at Liverpool’s Walton Prison for his role in the murder. Both held out for a reprieve, which would never come. Unknowingly, they would both enter the dark annuls of history as the final victims of a cruel chapter in our forgotten history.

We cannot know what their last thoughts must have been as they resigned themselves to the will of a society that sought justice and retribution for the murder of 53 year old John Alan West who they fatally stabbed in a bungled burglary.

Strangeways Prison built in 1861 and shown here in the early 1900s showing its Victorian Panopticon design.

Britains leading hangman Albert Pierrepoint made a gruesome craft of hanging, but even his skill and indeed that of the executioner Harry Allen could never have hoped to curtail the psychological suffering the majority of us pray will never know.

The appalling conditions they must have endured whilst they awaited their fate and which many people around the world continue to endure today and like Evans and West become victims of societies that exact the most barbaric and inhumane justice for heinous crimes that they believe misguidedly will rid society of its ills.